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Radical Chic

Eldridge Cleaver's frequent personal and political reinventions fascinated -- and sometimes appalled -- the public. Having come to prominence in the late 1960's as the author of ''Soul on Ice'' and as the mediagenic mouthpiece for the Black Panthers, Cleaver, who died in 1998, renounced his militancy in the mid-70's to join the Republican Party. Spiritually, he underwent similarly radical conversions, from being an atheist to becoming a born-again Christian who prayed with the televangelist Billy Graham. He was also a short-lived Moonie, founded the Cleaver Crusade for Christ in 1979 and the following year formed his own religion, Christlam, along with an auxiliary called the Guardians of the Sperm. Then he converted to Mormonism.

Still, it may come as a surprise to many that, in 1975, Cleaver, then living in exile in Paris after a 1968 shootout with the Oakland police, took out an ad in The International Herald Tribune seeking investors and manufacturers for his fledgling men's-wear collection. ''Millions in profits envisioned,'' the classified read. It neglected to add that at the heart of the line were his patented Cleavers, pants in which a man's genitals were outlined in a socklike codpiece. ''I want to solve the problem of the fig-leaf mentality,'' Cleaver told Newsweek. ''Clothing is an extension of the fig leaf -- it put our sex inside our bodies. My pants put sex back where it should be.''

When he turned himself in to the police a few months later and returned to America to face charges, he brought with him his desire to parlay his celebrity into a fashion brand -- just as many of today's public figures, from Regis Philbin and Jay-Z to the pope, have managed successfully. Unfortunately for Cleaver, no one bought in to his attempts to create a revolution below the waist, and the media used this foray into fashion as evidence that his once agile mind was failing him. (He didn't help his cause by claiming his pants would relieve murderous tensions in society.)

''My design has a tremendous future,'' he said, ''both artistically and commercially, because not just the intellect -- the head and face -- is honored. The other half of man's identity, the sex organs, is, too.''

Although not the only attempt to rehabilitate the codpiece (a Japanese penis pouch called the Nippon Slip-On was also marketed), Cleaver's design created the biggest stir in men's fashion since Beau Brummel. Despite his shameless attempts to model the pants at every opportunity, many newspapers refused to run pictures of the controversial garment. Even in '78, weeks before the release of ''Soul on Fire,'' his born-again follow-up to ''Soul on Ice,'' his designs incurred the wrath of the National Religious Broadcasters, which pulled a film on Cleaver from their convention schedule. Undeterred, Cleaver did another about-face, and moved to San Jose to devote his energies to designing flowerpots.